The present invention relates generally to messaging systems and, in particular, to a messaging system and method for maintaining synchronization of address directories.
Voice messaging systems are common in today""s business community. Most business organizations or enterprises make use of a private branch exchange (PBX) to direct a caller""s telephone call to the appropriate extension of the called party. If the called party is unable to answer the telephone call, the telephone call is forwarded to a voice messaging system, which allows the caller to leave a voice message in the mailbox assigned to the called party. Messages left for called parties within the business organization can be retrieved from memory by calling the voice messaging system using a telephone and entering appropriate commands via a touch-tone keypad. Retrieved messages can be played, forwarded or deleted. An example of a voice messaging system of this nature is the Series 6 sold by Mitel Corporation of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
In addition to voice messages, communications within business organizations are also stored in facsimile and text formats. In the past, separate messaging systems have been used to handle these different types of communications. Unfortunately, prior art messaging systems designed to handle one type of communication have not provided any means to interact with messaging systems handling other types of communications. This has required users to access each messaging system individually to retrieve messages and has required business organizations to maintain and manage multiple messaging systems separately. As a result, it has been necessary to establish separate accounts, address lists and message mailboxes in each messaging system for the various users in the business organizations.
More recently, attempts have been made to interconnect different messaging systems to provide access to different types of messages from a single point. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,349,636 to Irribarren discloses a system and method for voice mail systems and interactive voice response (IVR) systems. The Irribarren system includes a voice message system and a text message system integrated via a network, which coordinates the functions of each individual message system. A user may access messages stored in the voice message system and in the text message system via a single telephone call. Although this system allows access to different types of messages, the voice message and text message systems require separate management.
The current trend is to integrate these various messaging systems to allow users to access all types of communications once a connection is made to the messaging system. To that end, unified messaging systems have been developed to provide users access to virtually all of their communications. Messaging systems of this nature store all messages for entities within the enterprise at a common location. The entities may be individuals, groups, departments, or any appropriate logical organizations. Users accessing the messaging system via a telephone, desktop computer or other communication device have access to all of their messages regardless of message type and regardless of the type of communication device used to access the messaging system. Appropriate message translators such as text-to-speech (TTS) converters, speech-to-text (SST) converters, etc. are included to enable users to retrieve messages stored in formats not supported by the communication devices used to access the messaging system.
Although users may access the messaging system using a telephone or desktop computer, the needs of a user accessing the messaging system using a telephone are different than those of a user accessing the messaging system using a desktop computer. In the case of sending messages created via a telephone connection to the messaging system, addressing is of particular concern. Address directories are often distributed throughout an enterprise for many reasons such as directory population, system capacity, geographical dispersion, etc. However, when using a telephone to access the messaging system, due to the nature of the interface, access to dispersed directories has typically been slow if not impossible. Access speed is of course an important issue for messaging systems.
In the past, address directories in local telephony messaging servers of messaging systems have been populated with knowledge of all remote users to allow local users to address messages to the remote users. This has of course required extensive management to ensure all non-local directories are updated when a directory change has been made. Accordingly, improvements to addressing in messaging systems are desired.
Thus, there is a need for maintaining synchronization of address directories in messaging systems.
The present invention provides a messaging system where telephony functions of the messaging system are handled by a telephony messaging application while messages are stored at a separate post office, which maintains the directory or database of the messages as well as address information. To facilitate fast and efficient access to addressing information, the telephony messaging application maintains a local directory for enterprise wide addressing. This local directory, which is a subset of the addressing information maintained at the post office, provides a fast addressing look-up service catering specifically to telephony users. Since the number of fields of addressing information stored in the local directory is typically less than that of any post office or external directory, the overall size of records in the local directory is small. The result is a compact and efficient directory storing records of addressing information from multiple post offices and external directories. Furthermore, since the local directory is automatically synchronized with the addressing information in the post office, the accuracy of the local directory is maintained at a high level.
According to one aspect of the present invention there is provided a messaging system to store and retrieve messages for playback in response to user input commands, and which includes: a telephony messaging application responsive to incoming calls; a directory storing addressing information concerning addressable entities within said messaging system, said telephony messaging application accessing said directory in response to caller address queries; a post office to store user messages and including updatable addressing information concerning addressable entities within said messaging system; and a synchronization mechanism to synchronize the addressing information in said directory with addressing information in said post office.
In one embodiment, the synchronization mechanism is triggered in response to selected events and at selected intervals. The selected events include specified changes to critical addressing data stored in the post office. These specified changes may include changes to spoken greetings, changes to message destination data, and changes enabling telephone access to the messaging system.
In another embodiment, the selected intervals are programmable. As an example, the synchronization mechanism can be responsive to a timer in the telephony messaging application which fires at the selected intervals.
In still another embodiment, the synchronization mechanism includes an event notifier responsive to the timer and a directory service in communication with the post office. The event notifier polls the post office for addressing information that has changed since the last polling cycle. The directory service receives changed addressing information from the post office and updates the directory accordingly.
In yet another embodiment, the synchronization mechanism further validates all of the addressing information in the directory with corresponding addressing information in the post office at specified second intervals and synchronizes its clock with the post office clock at the selected intervals.
According to yet another aspect of the present invention there is provided in an messaging system, a method for synchronizing addressing information stored in a directory of a telephony messaging application with addressing information stored in a post office, said method comprising: at selected intervals, determining if changes to the addressing information in said post office have been made and, if so, updating the addressing information in said directory; and in response to selected changes in addressing information in said post office, updating the addressing information in said directory.
According to yet another aspect of the present invention there is provided in an messaging system, a method for synchronizing addressing information stored in a directory for a telephony messaging application with addressing information stored in a central database, said method comprising: determining when specific events have occurred at the telephony application; promptly synchronizing the directory and the central database with respect the specific events that have been determined to have occurred; and otherwise periodically synchronizing the directory and the central database at a predetermined time interval.